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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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Watch out for default user accounts and groups—they can become secret

backdoors to your network! All network operating systems have a default

Everyone group that can be used to sneak into shared resources easily. This

Everyone group, as its name implies, literally includes anyone who connects

to that resource. Windows gives full control to the Everyone group by

default, for example, so make sure you know to lock this down! The other

scary one is the Guest account. The Guest account is the only way to access a

system without a user name and password. Unless you have a compelling

reason to provide guest access, you should always make sure the Guest

account is disabled.

All of the default groups—Everyone, Guest, Users—define broad groups

of users. Never use them unless you intend to permit all of those folks access

to a resource. If you use one of the default groups, remember to configure

them with the proper permissions to prevent users from doing things you

don’t want them to do with a shared resource!

Security Policies

Although permissions control how users access shared resources, there are

other functions you should control that are outside the scope of resources. For

example, do you want users to be able to access a command prompt on their

Windows system? Do you want users to be able to install software? Would

you like to control what systems a user can log on to or at what time of day a

user can log on? All network operating systems provide you with some

capability to control these and literally hundreds of other security parameters,

under what Windows calls policies. I like to think of policies as permissions

for activities, as opposed to true permissions, which control access to

resources.

A policy is usually applied to a user account, a computer, or a group. Let’s

use the example of a network composed of Windows systems with a

Windows Server. Every Windows client has its own local policies program,

which enables policies to be placed on that system only. Figure 27-14 shows

the tool you use to set local policies on an individual system, called Local

Security Policy, being used to deny the Guest account the capability to log on

locally.

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